Next to Love (21 page)

A
MY SITS ON THE SWING IN THE CORNER OF THE YARD AND WATCHES
the grown-ups. You’d think they never saw a baby before.

She hates the baby. She hates the frilly pink dress, and the pink sunbonnet, and the tiny pink Mary Janes. Why does she need Mary Janes? She can’t even walk. Everyone carries her around. You’d think she’s some prize they’re fighting over, like the ones in the Cracker Jacks boxes. Her mommy can’t get enough of the thing.

Now Uncle Al is holding the stupid baby to his chest, walking around the yard singing “Ain’t She Sweet.” Her mommy says her daddy used to sing to her the same way. A song called “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew.” She even knows the words but she doesn’t remember her daddy singing them to her. She’s not even sure she remembers her daddy. She knows what he looks like, but that’s just the pictures on the wall.

She walks her sandals around in a circle on the grass until the chains of the swing are twisted, then closes her eyes, picks up her feet, and lets the swing twirl her around. It makes her dizzy. She opens her eyes.

Her mommy is holding the baby again. Drop it, she shouts in her head. Drop the stupid baby on her stupid head. Babies are supposed to have a place in their head that isn’t finished, and if you touch them there you can kill them.

Now Aunt Millie has the baby. She puts it in Uncle Claude’s lap. He holds it with one arm—drop it, drop it, drop it—and lets the other, the one without the fingers, hang down at the side of his chair. She used to be afraid of Uncle Claude’s hand, until he told her he got tired of trying to keep all those fingernails clean so he decided to get rid of some of them. She knew he was teasing her, but now she isn’t afraid anymore.

Aunt Babe takes the baby from Uncle Claude, and Amy jumps off the swing and goes over to where he is sitting. She puts her hands over his eyes. Guess who, she says, and after he makes silly guesses, he reaches around and pulls her onto his lap. She rests her head against him in the space under his chin. She loves the way he smells. It’s from the soap he puts on his face to shave. Once when she went to stay overnight with him and Aunt Babe, he let her watch him shave in the morning. He took a wooden bowl with white soap from the cabinet, mixed it up with water and a brush, and spread it on his cheeks and chin. Then he took the brush and spread some on her cheeks and chin and even a dab on her nose. He held her up to the mirror. I always thought we looked alike, he said. And for the rest of the day, even after he wiped off the soap, she smelled like him.

Naomi’s husband, Frank, smells the same way. She knows because, sometimes when he’s waiting for Naomi, he lets her sit on his lap. Once when she was sitting on his lap in Grandma’s kitchen while Naomi was making dinner, Grandpa came in, yelled at her to get off, and told Frank he could wait for Naomi in the yard. Frank lifted her off his lap and walked out of the kitchen without a word. She started to cry, but Naomi told her to hush.

“Your grandpa can’t help being mean.”

She stopped crying, not because Naomi told her to but because she was surprised. She knew her grandfather was mean, but she never heard anyone come out and say it.

“Because of your daddy,” Naomi added, in that funny tone people use when they mention her daddy.

The grown-ups are still carrying the stinking baby around, but she doesn’t care. She’s the one Uncle Claude is holding. She leans back against him, and the two of them sit very still in the middle of all the fuss.

After a while Uncle Claude has to lift her off his lap, because the grill is hot and he has to help Uncle Al make the hamburgers and hot dogs. When they’re ready, he calls her over and asks what she wants, and she says a hot dog with mustard please. He puts one in a bun, takes the mustard in his good hand, and writes
Amy
with it on the hot dog. She says thank you and carries it to the back steps, where Jack is eating. They have to lean apart to let Aunt Millie go up the steps to the kitchen. She comes back carrying the stinking baby’s stinking bottle. “I’ll give it to her,” her mommy says to Aunt Millie.

All of a sudden her hot dog tastes funny. The mustard
Amy
is just
ny
. She puts her paper plate on the steps, stands, and looks around to see if anyone is watching her. They’re all too busy with the baby, except Uncle Claude, who’s sitting with a bottle of beer in one hand, resting it on the arm of the chair. His eyes are closed. He’s tired of looking at the baby too.

She’s careful not to let the screen door bang behind her. The bottles are standing in a row on the counter beside the stove. Her mommy boiled them when everyone came, because Aunt Millie said she didn’t have time to at home. It’s called sterilizing. So the baby won’t get sick. She takes a bottle and one of the tops with a nipple off the counter and carries them upstairs.

A WEEK LATER
, Naomi finds the bottle when she is cleaning out the cabinet under the bathroom sink. At first she thinks it’s shampoo, because of the color. But why would anyone put shampoo in a baby’s bottle? When she picks it up, the liquid looks too thin for shampoo. She unscrews the top. The smell of urine stings her nose. The idea of someone peeing into a baby bottle is even less understandable than the idea of someone storing shampoo in a baby bottle. She opens the toilet and empties the bottle into it, then puts the bottle in the wastebasket to be taken out with the rest of the trash. She will not mention it to Grace. That child of hers has enough problems.

She won’t tell Frank either. He’ll say she’s protecting the Goodings again, the same way he did when King threw him out of the kitchen. She isn’t protecting the Goodings, she’s using them. King Gooding is mean-spirited, but he’s not stingy. He pays better than anyone in town. He pays almost as much as Frank makes at the factory. She’ll put up with more than Frank’s having to wait in the yard if it means their boys can go to college someday.

APRIL
1948

“It was nice of you to come,” Grace says to Mac Swallow, and wishes he would leave.

She wants to be alone. She wants to go into the sunporch, and sit with Amy tucked under her arm, and think about Charlie. Sometimes she reads Charlie’s letters aloud to Amy. Not the whole letters, of course, but the parts about Amy’s growing up and getting married and Charlie and her growing old together. That’s what she wants to do this evening. It’s fitting after the funeral. But Amy has disappeared into her room, and Mac is standing here, leaning against the kitchen counter, his hands in his pockets, watching her make coffee. He was Charlie’s best friend and Pete’s brother, and she has known him for as long as she can remember, a gangly boy with a body that always seemed to be growing too fast and a radiant smile that inspired trust in every mother’s heart. He has lost the radiant smile somewhere along the way, and now he makes her nervous. It has nothing to do with that business after he came home from the war. She is not afraid of Mac, no matter how peculiar people say he has grown. She just does not want him in her kitchen, leaning against the counter the way Charlie used to, watching her the way Charlie used to.

MAC’S EYES FOLLOW
her around the kitchen. How many times had he stood here with Charlie, or sat at the kitchen table with coffee or a beer or a drink with Charlie, teasing Grace, making Grace blush, watching Grace pretend to get angry at them? Stop ganging up on me, she’d say. But she didn’t mean it. She loved Charlie. God knows she loved him. Look at that crazy wall in the sunporch. But she loved having Mac around too. The husband’s good buddy; the hanger-on just enough in love with her to keep her color high, her shoulders back, and her stomach tucked in as she moved around the kitchen. She knew they were both watching her, and she reveled in it.

She does not revel in it now. He wonders if she is self-conscious about her weight. Or is that the point? She has put on the pounds like armor, to keep him and every other man away. But it isn’t working. She still looks good to him.

She carries the coffeepot and a plate of cookies to the table. He starts to pull out the chair at right angles to hers, sees the way her face begins to collapse, like Amy’s when she’s going to cry, and sits across from her. The other chair was Charlie’s. The other chair is Charlie’s.

She rearranges her face, pours him a cup of coffee, inches the plate of cookies nearer to him, and begins to talk. She will keep him at arm’s length with conversation. Nice service … perfect weather … Charlie would have liked it.

Stop it! he wants to shout. The service was just like any other burial, only worse. The sun was too citrusy, the air too soft with spring, and Charlie would not give a damn how he was buried. All he cared about was living.

“I wish Millie wouldn’t be so stubborn.”

He has missed something, too busy arguing with her in his head.

“About what?”

“What I just said. About bringing Pete home.”

Pete’s body, he wants to say.

“I know it’s breaking your parents’ hearts.”

His parents’ hearts are already broken. He knows that from the way his mother watches him when he comes home. Is that another reason he moved away? No, it has nothing to do with his mother, only with him. He is the reason he walked out of his brand-new office full of shiny new equipment, leaving a waiting room full of patients and another half naked on the examining table. Six months later he took a job in research at a hospital in Boston. Microscopes and slides and test tubes, but no sick bodies or maimed flesh or festering wounds. He has seen enough of all that to last several lifetimes.

The Jap barrage was a galaxy of shrieking red stars in the steaming air. Bodies lay on the jungle floor, mangled, moaning, reproachfully silent. The stretcher bearers could not keep up. A single machine-gun burst sliced through three of them. He did not stop to debate. He did not think about which of the men was single and which married and which a father. Tomkins, he shouted at the nearest man. Forrester. Rizzo. Go! They went. Two did not come back. Forrester was dragged in. He can still see the flies swarming over his wounds as he worked on him. He got him to the evac hospital, where they could do real surgery. Forrester died on the table.

“Couldn’t they do it themselves?” Grace is saying. “I bet they could. Millie is his wife, but they’re his parents. You ought to look into it for them.”

She stands, goes to a drawer in the corner, and begins rifling through papers.

“I know I have it here. The name and address of the organization you write to. You ought to do it, Mac. You really should.”

The papers rustle in the silence. He takes a swallow of coffee. He has let it get cold.

“Here it is.” She comes back to the table with a piece of paper and hands it to him. He takes it from her, though he knows he is not going to do anything about it.

He stands, thanks her for the coffee, tries not to read the relief in her face. She walks him to the door and thanks him for coming. They are both so grateful.

“Charlie would have liked it,” she says again.

“Stop saying that.”

She rears back as if he has slapped her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

He stands with his hand on the doorknob, looking down at her. She pushes her hair out of her eyes and stands up straight, the old Grace, conscious of herself, conscious of his looking at her. Is that what makes him do it?

He takes her hand. “Gracie.”

She pulls her hand away.

He is halfway down the front walk when the light comes on behind him. It illuminates a narrow strip of the yard. She has put on the front light for him. The gesture makes his heart swell, though he knows he should not let it, not in his condition. If he cannot put his hands on an ailing body, he has no right to touch her. But he cannot help himself. He turns to wave. That’s when he sees it. The light is not from the vestibule but from an upstairs window, the bathroom. She has not had time to pull down the shade. As he stands looking up, her head appears in the window, lurches forward out of sight, appears again. She is throwing up.

SHE BRUSHES HER TEETH
and gargles with mouthwash, but the bitter black taste lingers. It is still there when she gets into bed. The book does not put her to sleep. She keeps looking from the page to the clock on the night table, waiting for a reasonable time to turn out the light, though she knows darkness will not bring sleep any more than the book does. Finally, at eleven, a respectable hour, a normal hour, she closes the book, clicks off the lamp, and turns on her side.

Gracie.

The word comes back to her, almost as if someone is whispering it in the darkness. Charlie is whispering. Before she can stop it, her hand slides across the sheets. This time he will be there.

SUMMER
1950

She does not know how she got here. She does not remember getting out of bed. She has no recollection of going downstairs. She must have unlocked the front door. She never goes to sleep without making sure it’s bolted, not with her and Amy alone in the house. But suddenly here she is, standing on the front lawn, screaming, howling the foulest words she knows, words she never uses when she’s awake, not even in her head. And here, a moment later, is a police car. No sirens, thank heavens, no flashing lights, just one policeman behind the wheel and another getting out of the car and coming up the walk.

She is suddenly aware of her nightgown. It is white, and she knows from the days when she wore it with Charlie that her nipples and pubic hair are visible through the thin fabric. She turns and runs back into the house. The policeman’s footsteps sound on the path behind her. She grabs a coat from the front closet, pulls it on, and tries to button it, but her hands are shaking. At least she is covered by the time he reaches the door.

“Mrs. Gooding?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” A sound escapes. She does not know if it’s a laugh or a sob.

He is still standing in the doorway. “Can I come in?”